Full disclosure, I’m a PM on GKE. These articles get written because EVERY CUSTOMER WE TALK TO ASKS FOR THEM. “What are the best practices for x…”. Personally I stave these question off with “it depends” or “I’d really need to understand your business so we can appropriately talk about trade offs”. But honestly, I would LOVE if my customers trust amongst each other would mitigate the need to ask us for all up best practices on how to build and ship software.
If customers are asking for this, its important to ask why. The more obvious you make best practices (like via the UI, documentation etc) and what generally GCP offerings should be used for (e.g., Firestore is a NoSQL database that is good for flexible, hierarchical data structures to store and query data) and have strong use case examples, it would got a long way to mitigating this. It won't obviate it entirely, but it would likely move the needle on customer satisfaction. Whats driving these forms of contact is that it isn't obvious and clear what tech should be used for what, and in what common circumstances.
[0]: FWIW I have the same feedback about all the big cloud providers.
Fair feedback. My team is working hard to up level the documentation. But sometimes complex problems require complex solutions and it is quite the art to capture the 80% use case while leaving room for the rest.
I also think these questions are driven from a CYA perspective. Most of the enterprise companies I talk to are interested in offloading risk on to their cloud provider (but still somehow wanting every single knob available).
Azure Primitives (Compute, Networking, Storage) are a dumpster fire. Paas Services can only be as good as these primitives. Friends don't let friends use Azure. Just don't.
